But now, all that childlike innocence was dead, God visited him in the morning, and forthwith tried him.  A state of temptation became his life on earth.  Now that full manhood and sin had come upon him, he entered into the everlasting struggle.  Could it be that God really loved him more now than before?  The great saints have all left fragments of their torn flesh upon the thorns of the way of sorrow.  He tried to gather some consolation from this circumstance.  At each laceration of his flesh, each racking of his bones, he tried to assure himself of some exceeding great reward.  And then, no infliction that Heaven might now cast upon him could be too heavy.  He even looked back with scorn on his former serenity, his easy fervour, which had set him on his knees with mere girlish enthusiasm, and left him unconscious even of the bruising of the hard stones.  He strove also to discover pleasure in pain, in plunging into it, annihilating himself in it.  But, even while he poured out thanks to God, his teeth chattered with growing terror, and the voice of his rebellious blood cried out to him that this was all falsehood, and that the only happiness worth desiring was in Albine’s arms, amongst the flowers of the Paradou.

Yet he had put aside Mary for Jesus, sacrificing his heart that he might subdue his flesh, and hoping to implant some virility in his faith.  Mary disquieted him too much, with her smoothly braided hair, her outstretched hands, and her womanly smile.  He could never kneel before her without dropping his eyes, for fear of catching sight of the hem of her dress.  Then, too, he accused her of having treated him too tenderly in former times.  She had kept him sheltered so long within the folds of her robe, that he had let himself slip from her arms to those of a human creature without being conscious even of the change of his affection.  He thought of all the roughness of Brother Archangias, of his refusal to worship Mary, of the distrustful glances with which he had seemed to watch her.  He himself despaired of ever rising to such a height of roughness, and so he simply left her, hiding her images and deserting her altar.  Yet she remained in his heart, like some love which, though unavowed, is ever present.  Sin, with sacrilege whose very horror made him shudder, made use of her to tempt him.

Whenever he still invoked her, as he did at times of irrepressible emotion, it was Albine who showed herself beneath the white veil, with the blue scarf knotted round her waist and the golden roses blooming on her bare feet.  All the representations of the Virgin, the Virgin with the royal mantle of cloth-of-gold, the Virgin crowned with stars, the Virgin visited by the Angel of the Annunciation, the peaceful Virgin poised between a lily and a distaff, all brought him some memory of Albine, her smiling eyes or her delicately curved mouth or her softly rounded cheeks.